Talking the talk is not enough

Talking the talk is not enough
by David Benjamin

The family of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., has asked Americans to honor the slain civil-rights leader on his birthday by some act of public service. My gesture this year consists of a letter, mailed on 15 January, to Congresswoman Mia Love (R-Utah) who has both protested by her words and enabled by her political complicity the naked racism of the current Oval Office occupant.

Dear Congresswoman Love:

I’m writing to suggest, in all humility, that there is no place for you in the Republican Party. You do not belong because you are a Haitian-American. You do not belong because you are a black woman. You do not belong, simply and irrefutably, because of the color of your skin.

I say this despite the eloquence, bravery and alacrity of your response to a president of your party who last week profanely condemned, out of racial animus, your nation, your heritage and the brothers and sisters of your race.

You said — and I record this because it deserves to be remembered and repeated: “The President’s comments are unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values. This behavior is unacceptable from the leader of our nation. My parents came from one of those countries but proudly took an oath of allegiance to the United States and took on the responsibilities of everything that being a citizen comes with. They never took a thing from our federal government. They worked hard, paid taxes, and rose from nothing to take care of and provide opportunities for their children. They taught their children to do the same. That’s the American Dream. The President must apologize to both the American people and the nations he so wantonly maligned.”

It took other members of your party — the white males — much longer to react to the President’s tantrum. Your answer was immediate, heartfelt, vehement and entirely appropriate.

But it’s not enough.

When I was growing up, in a reliably Democratic-voting family, I had good reason — if I knew better — to be ashamed of my family’s political loyalties. The Democratic Party in those days harbored a coterie of Southern bigots who — although supportive of the New Deal’s social progressivism — clung to a vicious and pervasive system of uniquely American racism. For a century after the Civil War, Southern Democrats wrote and enshrined Jim Crow laws, turned a blind eye to the lynch mobs who enforced those laws, and formed a united front to obstruct efforts by their fellow Democrats — and most Republicans — to remove the de jure and de facto tentacles of apartheid in America.

However, at a time when I was coming of age in politics, learning its mores and nuances, I watched as one of those Southern Democrats, President Lyndon B. Johnson, change everything. LBJ contrived — at peril to the electoral future of his party — to heal forevermore the racial schizophrenia of the Democratic Party.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, forced through Congress by the implacable will of President Johnson, placed the Democratic Party firmly and finally on the side of justice and equality. I hasten to admit that the Democratic Party has hardly been consistent or vigorous in its commitment to racial justice. Black Americans have continue to have grievances with a political party for whom they vote overwhelmingly. They stick to the Democrats because in almost every election, their opponents offer no credible choice whatsoever. But I’m consoled by the knowledge that the Democratic Party offers no refuge, nor even a toehold, for the white supremacists, neo-Nazis and resurgent Klansmen who have always infested our body politic.

The same caveat has not applied to the Republican Party for fifty years. A half-century of institutional racism in the GOP began when candidate Richard Nixon’s pandered to white race hatred with his so-called — and successful — “Southern strategy” in 1968. This pattern has waxed and waned, but it was never abandoned by a GOP that often treated unspoken racism as a means to its ends. It sank to new depths with Trump’s slanders against Mexicans, black neighborhoods, Muslim gold-star families and non-white “shithole” countries.

Trump’s racism is not, as many commentators — Republicans among them — have made clear, unique to him. It is an institution. Trump serves merely as the Republican Party’s white-pride orange-coiffed apotheosis.

He hates you, Congresswoman Love, because you are black.

There is ample evidence of the GOP’s acquiescence to the tribal racism upon which it has come to depend in an increasingly multicultural United States. The most telling recent example is the pusillanimous reaction to Trump’s inflammatory insults to Africa, Haiti and, yes, Norway, by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Embarrassed again by the bigot in the White House, the Speaker could only characterize Trump’s racist taunts as “unfortunate” and “unhelpful.” A few days later, Dr. Ben Carson, Trump’s only black Cabinet member, reprised Ryan’s chickenheartedness by standing before a black audience on the birthday of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and noted that Trump’s vile words were “not helpful.”

Need I point out the political implications of the repeated term “helpful,” in that it refers not to the moral depravity of Trump’s outrage but to its potential effect on Republican electoral prospects?

I understand that it’s the prime directive of every elected official to get re-elected, to stay in office on behalf of your constituents. You must make the demeaning sacrifices and accept the compromises that make re-election more likely.

But today, Congresswoman, you risk clinging to your position at the price of your soul, to the detriment of your people — black Americans, Haitian-Americans, the black and white people who live in every “shithole” derided by Trump, and of the people of America from coast to coast who have come here from every corner of the earth, inspired by the words of Emma Lazarus:

“… Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Your duty, if you truly believe in that golden door, is to shed your loyalty to a political party which, for your lifetime, has shown no allegiance to you, to your people, or to the magnificent contributions that black and Haitian-Americans have made — with precious little recompense — to the nation’s culture.

You owe it to your constituents and to your conscience to show that your courage goes beyond words. You owe it yourself to walk away from a Republican Party that has sold its soul to white nationalism, a morally bankrupt fraternity of old white men that refuses to reject the racism in its midst and the racist vulgarian in the White House.

It’s relevant to note that hundreds of Democratic elected officials and millions of white Democrats left their Party after passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act. They did so in the cause of racism. You have the opportunity to take the same step in reverse, in the cause of racial justice.

The Democratic Party would, I suspect, welcome you. I like to think that even the Republican voters of Utah would be willing to overlook your new party affiliation and reward you for your extraordinary integrity — a miracle, indeed, of strange device among this sorry generation of spineless Republicans.

If not, if joining the loyal opposition results in the surrender of your sinecure in Congress — as a victim of Trumpist racism — you would truly lose nothing more than the company of scoundrels.

Sincerely,